Water and Energy

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I recently finished up a piece at the day job on the connection between water and energy, and perhaps as a result, everywhere I turn these days I’m seeing stories on the linkage. Today’s example comes from Cynthia Barnett:

Matthew Cohen, a professor in UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation, and post-doctoral researcher Jason Evans in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation analyzed energy and water impacts for four ethanol crops — corn, sugarcane, sweet sorghum and pine — in Florida and Georgia. Their study, published in Global Change Biology, found that all four yielded net energy; meaning they are viable for replacing fossil fuels. But it also concluded that ramping up production enough to meet U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act mandates for renewable fuels by 2022 “would have significant impacts on both land use and water resources.”

To we dry-climate southwesterners, Florida might seem like a what-me-worry water state, with 40 inches of rain (100 cm) in a bad year. But the problem really is all relative. It’s about how you use the water you’ve, and Barnett has documented Florida’s serious water problems.

Waxman-Markey Horse Trading, a Case Study

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My Albuquerque Journal colleague Mike Coleman has a nice example in today’s paper (might be behind paywall, a bit of a crapshoot there) of the horse trading now underway in an attempt to win passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill:

Rep. Harry Teague, a southern New Mexico Democrat, this week persuaded the authors of a sweeping, national climate-change bill to include language protecting small refiners and electric co-ops from some costs associated with the legislation.
Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and a lead sponsor of the bill, confirmed Wednesday that Teague’s amendments — opposed by some Democrats and large refiners — would be a part of the climate change package scheduled for a House vote Friday.
Inclusion of the amendments in the bill before the floor debate dramatically increases their chance of surviving and becoming law.
“Harry Teague was concerned about the impact this bill would have on small refiners, and we made an adjustment in the legislation,” Markey said in response to a question from the Journal at a Capitol Hill news conference. “As a result, I think Harry is looking very favorably on the bill.”

Colorado River Quote of the Week

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Some scientists predict that climatic changes could alter historic precipitation patterns, and reduce available water supplies. Carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel combustion, mostly in coal-burning power plants, threatens a significant climate change…. A National Academy of Sciences report estimates that the resulting temperature increase and reduction in precipitation could diminish water supplies by almost forty percent in the Upper Colorado Region.

David Getches, Competing Demands for the Colorado River, University of Colorado Law Review, 1984

OK, that was a few weeks ago, but you get my point. People have been talking about this for a very long time.

Runoff Timing

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In light of yesterday’s mediapalooza about the new federal climate report (see my contributions here and here), there’s an interesting on-the-ground reality check today in the Denver Post:

Colorado’s peak flow from snowmelt hit a few weeks earlier than normal, causing problems for some recreational users of the state’s rivers and complicating downstream irrigation strategies.

A dozen late-winter windstorms coated high mountain snow with dust, causing the snow to melt earlier than usual. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Erin Curtis said the peak occurred in late May.

BLM is especially worried about flows on the Colorado River in the western part of the state, where the so-called flat water is running especially cold and fast, at a flow now about five times what it will be later this summer….
Water storage may also be an issue, said Andy Barrett of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.

Groundwater Recharge in California

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A lazyweb question for any of the Calfornia water geeks in the audience….

My old employer, the Pasadena Star-News, had an editorial over the weekend that raised the question of groundwater recharge in the following backhanded way:

During a recent dust-up over city of Pasadena water rates, two of the conservation skeptics wrote an essay for our Perspectives page with an entirely new twist on the anti-conservation point of view. When homeowners and businesses with large plots of landscaping don’t water very much, they argue, there’s a lot less water going back into the underground aquifers from which many cities and water companies still get plenty of well water. In other words, conserving could be counter-productive.

Is this right? I know that the answer to the question here in Albuquerque is a complex function of where the lawn is located, so there’s probably no easy answer to this. But in general, in Southern California, how much recharge from municipal watering occurs?

Will Canada and the U.S. go to war over water?

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No.

But a story by Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail illustrates the delicacies of transboundary water questions, and by coincidence is one of two interesting examples of the problem that scrolled across my monitor this morning.

Hume’s story details objections by residents of British Columbia to a dam being contemplated in Washington state that has the potential to back up water across the border to the north:

The Shanker’s Bend project, proposed by the Okanogan County Public Utility District, would dam the Similkameen River just a few kilometres south of the B.C. border.

The project would provide increased water storage and hydro generation for the town of Oroville, in north central Washington, but it would also back up water deep into the Similkameen Valley – flooding the habitat of endangered species in an area that has been proposed as a national park.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Iraq’s minister of water resources complains that Turkey is failing to live up to its commitments to allow water to flow down the Euphrates:

“Because of the reservoirs and dams which are built in Turkey, our share of water has decreased drastically,” Rashid explained.  “The middle and south of Iraq are suffering a severe drought, and now it is the season of agriculture, but we don’t have sufficient water to have our agriculture plans implemented.”

The flow from the Euphrates River to Iraq is currently 230 cubic meters per second, and the agreement with Turkey stipulated an increase in flow of up to 360 cubic meters per second.

If one was obsessed with economic principles and the notion of market failures in everything, one might note that we have two examples here of externalities, complicated by the transboundary separation of the economic actors who benefit from a particular water infrastructure, and the economic actors who are harmed.